by M. D. Cooper
“That had an effect,” Flaherty said, a small measure of excitement slipping into his voice. “The umbrella in that section lost a layer when the fighter hit.”
“How is the fighter, though?” Sera asked.
“Looks like its disabled,” Flaherty replied. “Though the dampeners did keep the pilot alive.”
Sera said to the fleet captains.
She outlined what she would need to the captains and left their virtual conference.
“Cheeky, set this course, maximum acceleration.”
Cheeky’s eyes grew wide. She looked up at Sera. “Are you serious?”
“I am. Sabrina can take it. I know this will work.”
“This isn’t like the rest of your super-secret special knowledge!” Cargo turned, his eyes filled with fear and worry. “The Intrepid’s scientists just invented stasis shields two days ago! This is our shakedown run, for star’s sakes!”
“You can get out and walk if you want to,” Sera replied to Cargo without breaking eye contact with Cheeky. “Do it now.”
Cheeky nodded and turned to her work. As Sabrina began to turn away from the battle, a call came in from Rebecca. Sera put it on the tank.
“Running away already?” Rebecca asked, her expression haughty as Sera had expected.
“I know when to cut my losses,” Sera replied. “Good luck storming a ship with a hundred thousand square kilometers of deck with your rag-tag band of miscreants. That is, before the AST comes in and exterminates you.”
“I’m not afraid of those core-worlders,” Rebecca replied. “I’ll have that ship, and I’ll use it to hunt you down and crush you. You’ll be back under my tender ministrations before you know what happened.”
“Sure, whatever,” Sera replied and cut the connection.
She let out a deep sigh.
“Let’s hope that riles her up enough.”
No one on Sabrina’s bridge replied as Kithari grew larger in the forward view.
Sabrina flashed past the jovian and raced out into the space beyond, Cheeky altering course until the planet obscured her from The Mark’s fleet.
The fusion engines were running at full bore, singing with the pure helium-3 the Intrepid had supplied. Between them the AP nozzle was spun out to its maximum focal length, and at the ship’s bow, the grav drives were parting the thick interstellar medium before pushing it back together behind Sabrina for the other drives to react against.
After seven minutes, Cheeky cut the thrust and spun the ship, reversing burn and bringing their velocity, relative to Kithari, to zero.
She locked eyes with Sera, who nodded slowly.
Directly ahead, a tenth of an AU distant, the gas giant rotated slowly, its space lanes mostly clear, except for a cluster of ships around the orbital habitation.
Cheeky brought all engines to full, hurling the ship toward the planet.
Sabrina’s collision detection systems blared warnings, and Sera shut them off, only to see the comm board light up with calls from system traffic control warning of an impending impact. Defensive beams, meant to prevent asteroid impacts with the gas giant peppered the ship, but the stasis shield shrugged them off.
The seven minutes it took to travel the distance back to the planet seemed to take forever. Then, in the last few seconds, Kithari grew rapidly and at a pre-programmed time, Sabrina twitched, sliding to the side of the planet, brushing past the jovian’s swirling clouds.
“Correcting!” Cheeky called out as she aimed the ship at The Mark’s armada as it chased the Intrepid around Fierra.
For a second, The Mark’s armada was visible as a small dot closing on the Intrepid, and then everything went black.
Nothing they threw at The Mark’s shield bubble had any effect. The pirate fleet just kept coming. At least it was moving slowly—relatively speaking—as it matched speeds with the Intrepid so they could envelope and board the colony ship.
Tanis had pulled the Dresden, Orkney, and their fighters closer to the Intrepid. If Rebecca was going to seal them inside her armada’s shields, she would enclose a lot of enemy ships in with her.
The Mark ships seemed to realize this, and were doing their best to neutralize the ISF cruisers before they made their final approach.
Given enough time, the enemy’s plan might work, but for the moment, refractive clouds of chaff kept their beams at bay, and the Intrepid’s scoop-turned-MDC tore the enemy’s missiles apart while a punishing barrage of rail slugs kept the enemy focusing much of their energy on their super-shield.
Tanis had to admit that Rebecca’s plan was not too bad—right up until the part where she thought that boarding the Intrepid could actually work.
Perhaps they really didn’t understand how large the ship was, or anticipate the four thousand Marines in powered armor who stood ready to repel any boarders.
“She hasn’t come through yet,” the scan officer reported.
“I don’t care. Get those tugs in position,” Tanis replied. “When she shows, they’ll need to grab that bubble and toss it high, or we’re going to be wearing a fleet’s worth of shrapnel.
Tanis glanced to the other tank where the battle between Bollam’s ships and her two defensive lines raged. Dozens of ISF fighters had been disabled, but so far her capital ships had not taken any serious hits.
The two squadrons of Arc-6’s were making all the difference. The ships had destroyed half a dozen destroyers and two cruisers, even though the ISF ships had to continually retreat lest they face overwhelming weapons fire.
“Just a little longer,” Tanis whispered.
“There!” the scan officer cried out.
Tanis felt the bridge slow down around her as she watched the events unfold one millisecond at a time.
Sabrina exploded from high in Kithari’s clouds, traveling at over ten thousand kilometers per second, on a course that would take it only a kilometer over the Intrepid’s stern.
At the same time, two of the heavy pusher tugs boosted hard, their stasis grapples reaching out and grabbing The Mark’s shield bubble. Fusion engines capable of nudging small worlds out of orbit fired on full burn and The Mark armada was pushed up, above the Intrepid.
The maneuver took only three seconds and then the tugs accelerated away from pirate fleet.
Sabrina lanced across the shrinking distance, perfectly aligned with her target.
A split second later, holo emitters dimmed their output as a blinding explosion flared. The Mark’s shield bubble, along with the armada within, was gone.
A subdued cheer sounded across the bridge at the apparent destruction of Rebecca and her entire fleet while scan searched for Sabrina.
“There!” the scan officer called out and this time the bridge really did erupt in cheers. “Their entire ship appears to be in stasis. No, wait, it’s out, it’s decelerating and turning around.”
“Going to take them a bit, to get back here, they’re already a quarter million kilometers away,” Tanis said to herself, then aloud, “any sign of our pirate friends?”
“No,” scan replied. “Unless you consider a field of pebble-sized debris a sign.”
Tanis expected the incredible show of power to cause the Boller fleet to draw back, but the rain of debris falling on Fierra’s northern hemisphere seemed to incense them all the more.
“They’re committing nearly half their fleet,” the scan officer announced, worry lacing his voice.
“So they are,” Tanis said softly, sharing a significant look with Admiral Sanderson and Captain Andrews.
Jessica gave a mental cry of victory as she punched through a cruiser’s shields and sent a missile into
its engines.
Jessica schooled her emotions as she surveyed the battlefield, searching for her and Jerry’s next target. The Pike and Gilese were falling back, behind a cloud of dust and gravel that Kithari had collected while orbiting its star. The cover kept the enemy ships from advancing too quickly, but with no inertial dampening the ISF cruisers were sitting ducks when in range of the enemy’s beams.
The Arc-5s were also having only limited success.
While they couldn’t jink anywhere near as fast as the 6’s—or the enemy’s capital ships, for that matter—their pilots had discovered two key weaknesses in the enemy’s targeting algorithms.
The first was that they were not used to tracking such small targets at high relative v. The second was that when a ship jinked, they expected it to move a lot further. To the Boller targeting AIs, every move the fighters made looked like a feint. Given that a high percentage of their movements were feints, it was rare that an enemy beam fired at a location actually occupied by a fighter.
The erratic movement of the fighters was causing the Boller ships to continually tighten their ranks. Initially they were spread out over more than six million cubic kilometers of space. That had tightened to just over a million cubic kilometers.
The fighters flitted through the region, creating enticing targets and placing themselves between enemy ships as often as possible. Entire fields of fire became unavailable to the enemy cruisers and destroyers, and ships that did not update their view of the battlefield fast enough contributed to an increasing amount of friendly fire incidents.
The ISF Arcs had no such issue. The squadron AIs were linked, providing an accurate view of the battlefield drawn from millions of sensors. Above that, Jessica could feel the combined hand of Tanis and Angela, guiding the ships in her fleet with lightning reflexes no human should possess.
Jessica knew what they were talking about, but had never experienced it first-hand. Several times since the first defense against the relativistic battle when the STR had attacked with in Sol, Tanis had spread her consciousness out across the ship’s tactical nets coaxing and guiding all of the vessels under her command with one omniscient hand.
It was a thing that only AI could do, and even few of them could manage such a large network. Many believed it was actually Bob and not Tanis guiding them—that he put a friendly face on his actions, but anyone who had Linked with Tanis knew better. This had her touch—hers and Angela’s.
Jessica knew those two had been paired too long—everyone knew it, but no one spoke of it. Many had asked Amanda or Priscilla if Tanis was a full merge, and the avatars always responded in the negative.
Jessica had even queried Bob extensively and he emphatically stated that Tanis and Angela were two distinct entities.
Two entities that shouldn’t be able to spread their minds over a net like they had during every space battle since that first.
Every pilot in the fleet knew it was unnatural, that it probably violated the Phobos Accords, and no one cared. To them, Tanis was their savior, their guiding hand in the dark.
That hand directed Jessica to another target of opportunity, and she saw her entire squadron following the same path. They arched over one of the enemy cruisers, jinking and spinning at their pilot’s thresholds, before simultaneously firing proton beams at the ship, penetrating its grav shield in a dozen locations.
Then the squadron’s fighters rotated weapons and picked off three of the cruisers’ close-support destroyers.
Four ships taken out in seconds. Only a few hundred more to go.
She saw another cruiser go up as three squadrons of Arc-5s overwhelmed its shields.
The tactics and coordination would likely go down in the history books as one of the most brilliantly fought battles in hundreds of years.
But they were still losing.
Despite the small victories of the ISF fighters, the Bollam’s ships pushed forward, there were just too many for them to hold back.
The Arc-5s fell back to provide cover for the Pike and Gilese as the ISF capital ships pulled further back toward their mother ship, now only five-hundred thousand kilometers distant.
A flash of light washing over her sensors momentarily blinded Jessica. She reset her instruments and pulled in an update, amazed at what she saw. Sabrina had hit The Mark fleet with astounding kinetic energy, and completely obliterated the entire armada.
The pilots carried out the conversation as they streaked across the enemy fleet, peppering ships with beam fire and missiles.
The pilots acknowledged and worked to get as many engine shots as possible, a maneuver that was becoming increasingly difficult as the Boller targeting and evasion AI adapted to the fighter’s tactics.
Rock signaled his acknowledgement. The Black Death broke into a wide formation and boosted past the Boller ships they had been engaging. Jessica saw that the other two squadrons of Arc-6s fighting on the far side of Kithari were doing the same.
If Jessica could have moved her jaw, she would have gritted her teeth with determination. She knew better, but it still felt like Tanis was sending the squadron on a suicide run.
Their stasis shields appeared to be nearly invincible, but every pilot could see their reactor temperatures spike whenever the shields had to deflect a heavy barrage. Each time they did, they didn’t quite cool to their previous level.
There was a limit to how much punishment the Arc-6s could take.
The next wave of enemy ships was approaching fast, only a hundred thousand kilometers distant. Cordy began flagging potential targets and Rock spotted one he liked.
Jessica calmed herself, thinking of that porch she and Tanis would sit on one day as they remembered the old days.
Once more into the breach.
“What’s your plan?” Admiral Sanderson asked as Tanis directed her ships to fall back.
“The cruisers used the cover of battle to seed those asteroid clusters with RMs. When those ships advance past, they’re going to get a hundred nuclear fireballs up their asses.”
Sanderson nodded slowly, but still frowned. “Some ships will survive. Over half by tactical’s estimation.”
Tanis nodded. “We’re going to pull the same trick you guys did while I was flying across the galaxy. After what Sera did, the Van Allen belts on Kithari are going nuts. We’re going to syphon that radiation with the scoop and lance it out at them again. It’ll weaken their shields just before we pelt them with grapeshot.”
“If they come in range, we’ll do it again to them. I’m betting that it will re-instate the stalemate and buy us time to get our stasis shield up,” Tanis replied, her brow furrowed as she spun the main holo view, testing various strategies.
She looked up at the captain and admiral, both standing with her at the holo tank.
“There’s no good plan here, no sure win. We just have to hold them off and buy time. Honestly, it’s a damned miracle we’ve taken only the minor losses we have.”
Tanis really wanted to talk to Sera, she felt the woman would have some knowledge that could help out—keep her from using her weapon of last resort. But first she had to mollify the captain and admiral.
“What if the AST ships engage?” Sanderson asked.
“Then I’ll dance for joy,” Tanis replied. “That’s what I’m counting on.”
“The Boller ships will pass the asteroid fields in one minute,” the scan officer announced.
Tanis nodded in acknowledgement and took a deep breath, spreading her mind across all the ships and fighters in her fleet, accounting for each one and ensuring none would be caught in the attack.
The killing field was clear of ISF ships; every vessel cruising on their assigned trajectories.
She watched with her mind as much as eyes, witnessing the RM’s come to life and streak out of their cover, driving toward the rear of the enemy fleet. The missiles jinked and shifted, using every trick their onboard NSAI could muster to avoid the defensive measures of their prey.
Not that there was much time to do so. The relativistic missiles were traveling at half the speed of light in less than a minute, leaving a thousand kilometers of hot plasma in their wake.